Thing #19

Award winning web 2.0 sites, here I come!

Completely intimidated by the long list, I had it narrowed down for me and picked from a short list.

I was not impressed by a lot of the sites -- not because they are bad, but because I didn't seem to have the void they would be filling for me. I did like Netvibes and even went as far as creating an account. I don't know if I will use it.

Pros -- accessibility from anywhere, the potential to accumulate all the web stuff on the same page (del.icio.us, web search, blog search, video search, rollyo (? - don't know yet, but I guess if I was able to add it to the blog, I can figure out how to add it to Netvibes), the ease of editing.

Cons -- limited selection, concentrating on feeds (another "pro" -- preset choices for feeds, "con" -- massive number of feeds coming, a little overwhelming). Didn't see the way to list all yahoo groups -- am I hopelessly 20th century?

Interesting -- I was able to add a webpage in one of the "squares" allotted to each feature (could not change its size so it really doesn't help much); I added a "To-Do list" (I can use it when I want to remember to get a library book or two for the kids and have to email myself at work -- now I can just put it ont he To-Do list"); the weather forcast automatically came up for Baltimore (I didn't need to enter the zip).

Thing #19 is NETVIBES! Check!

ZoHo

I'm officially in awe! Publishing a doc that I created in ZoHo is great, but what I liked even better was the ease with which I can email documents and change their format. For example, if I have a Word doc and I need to send it to somebody who doesn't have MS Office, I can put it through ZoHo and turn into a pdf. OT: it doesn't look pretty in Russian. But it's amazing that it is available to work in many languages.

GoogleDocs is OK. I would have been more impressed with it if I saw it first, before ZoHo. Now... not so much.

Thnk #18 -- check!

For the blog

This is wonderful!  I will be bookmarking it on del.icio.us for all Edgewood librarians to use!  All the advantages are obvious, after publishing this to my blog, I'll know how easy it is to manipulate it. 

 

Let's try adding to it.  It worked!

 

How about a picture?

 

That worked as well!

 

I got this picture from here.

 

Off to import it into my blog!

Sandbox Wiki

There are only two more blogs on the Favorite Blogs page for HCPL. We don't look too good!!! I did add our logo, and I have to say, it looks like the best one on the page -- very classy. Other counties have much longer lists there. I guess we lose our participants to the Front Page. Oh well!

Thing #17 - check

Wikis

Wikis are OK. All the cons and pros are right there in the instructional slideshow. I would like to see how they are being used in education. What I have seen in quickly glancing through examples, doesn't look all that revolutionary from the result end. On the other hand, the idea that web creating is so easy and intuitive is very encouraging. I have already started a couple wikis that I would like to use in our homeschooling, but my kids are too young to set them completely loose in the www. I was thinking about going through 13 moons series by Jean Craighead George and having a page for each "moon," i.e. each animal, and ask the kids to add interesting facts about each animal. We'll see how it works.

Thing #16 -- check!

Thoughts about Web 2.0

First, I have to admit I had to use Google to figure out what OCLC is. Even though it sounded familiar, I could not think what the acronym stands for. So much for "one-button commands" -- kind of ironic, not a single link there was to the homepage, their own article about being user-friendly was not. So I learned from the first google page of hits that OCLC is Online Computer Library Center.

My other thoughts about the OCLC newsletter are even less "progressive," so I'll keep them to myself. I'll just say that there is nothing wrong with having a place where you can simply walk to and just by browsing the shelf find an obscure book you always wanted to read or simply leaf through. And there is nothing wrong with having to click more than one button to find information. I think libraries are a reflection of the society, but I also think they (we) shape it in a way, and we don't need to contribute to shortening people's attention span and convincing them that if something is more than one click away, it's not worth the effort.

Moving on...

Out of Order - YouTube

YouTube -- Check!

The site is intuitive, easy to use. I don't like watching videos online, so I don't think I'll be returning there often, especially since I don't have enough of the imagination to do a search that would bring anything worth watching. I did find a couple interestting videos -- like a snippet from a book talk by Jasper Fforde -- can't link them here, don't remember where they are.

The video I'm posting here is also related to Jasper Fforde, and it's related to libraries -- it's a tease for The Eyre Affair which happens to be one of my favorite books. I think it's very creative.

Technorati

It was only a matter of time until the blog community started working on its own search engine and came up with Technorati. It was just common sense. Technorati itself is not always. The most obvious feature that Technorati is missing (or is it me who is missing it? or simply can't find it?) is the opportunity to sort search results by relevance. I have had entries that don't even have the word I was searching for come up among the first five. Just to test it, I did a search on Technorati and on Google, using exact same terms and adding the word "blogs" on Google and I found much more relevant and interesting results. Besides, if you take an extra step before you put in your search term, you can get to the Google search page that only searches blogs. Another drawback of Technorati is that it may "find" your keywords in book titles people list as favorites, and those "hits" are really useless. Search by tags was more satisfying, and I was pleasantly surprised by some video "hits" relevant to my search.

I'm not going to mess with tags on Technorati -- I understand the concept, the site looks like it would be easy to figure it out, I just don't see the need -- my blog doesn't have any earth-shattering information or insights, so I'm not going to clutter cyberspace just because I can.

Thing # 14 -- check!

Savage Nature

No comment...

Del.icio.us Thoughts

In a nutshell -- great potential, not worth the trouble personally, redundant professionally. I can see that it would be awesome help if we didn't already have all the links amassed on our HCPL website. I was very impressed with the Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users article, and it's wonderful that del.icio.us can do all those things, but at this point I am not going to try and set up an account and transfer all my bookmarks there. I consider sites like this and Rollyo to be a step (or several) away from Google, but they are just too time consuming to set up to be a big improvement. You are basically trying to do manually what google does in seconds even on a dial-up computer. I have a lot of bookmarks already saved on my computer, and I very seldom consult them, then I stumble upon new cool sites, and I don't even bother to bookmark them anymore, because I'm afraid I won't find them in my sea of bookmarks, so I put shortcuts on the desktop, and never look there either... I don't want to spend time setting up something I will never use. The idea of del.icio.us sounds very similar to what a9 -- I think -- tried to do a couple years ago, and I tried it, but never got in the habit of using it. I don't think it allowed to create your own tags, I simply don't remember. I'm not sure it's still around, I do remember Amazon.com was pushing it and offering monetary incentives.

I took a look at the lists maintained by libraries, and most of them didn't look very user friendly. Once you start tagging sites by very specific tags, the list of tags will get out of hand. For example, one of the tags was aquarium (with just one link in it), and I can't imagine time when I would purposefully look for "aquarium' on the list of tags. When your search is that specific (and broad at the same time -- not a specific animal), you might as well... that's right, Google it. A lot of tags had just one site underneath, which is not very efficient, you might as well make a simple list of favorite sites if you have them "unbundled" like that.

Moving on...